We have officially arrived in the NFL’s general manager power era. As the coaching carousel spins and teams around the league get to work replacing 10 head coaches, there is less turnover among top football executives than ever. A bunch of team owners seemingly decided that things were bad enough in the 2025 season that someone had to go, but in many cases, that someone wasn’t the person responsible for building the roster. For decades, head coaches were some of the most famous and powerful people in the sport; now, front office executives are starting to gain an upper hand.
It has been building this way for some time, with a significant shift in that direction two years ago when Bill Belichick and Pete Carroll were forced out of their roles in New England and Seattle, respectively. But during this current, highly chaotic head coaching cycle, the power pendulum has fully swung toward the GMs.
Nearly a third of the league has (or had, since four jobs have been filled) a coaching vacancy this offseason—but only two franchises entered the offseason looking for new general managers. And amid this trend, general managers from underperforming franchises haven’t just kept their jobs despite coaching shake-ups; in some cases, they’ve managed to amass even more power.
Take Buffalo, which fired longtime head coach Sean McDermott on Monday, two days after the Bills lost to Denver in the divisional round of the playoffs. You can certainly justify the move: McDermott’s teams were consistently very good, but they never managed to get over the hump in the AFC despite having one of the league’s elite quarterbacks. And recently, McDermott’s defense—the part of the team he controlled and closely managed—had taken a step back. (Sean Payton, the Broncos’ head coach and offensive play caller, got the best of McDermott several times on Saturday by dialing up plays specifically designed to exploit weaknesses in coverage and take advantage of McDermott’s schematic tendencies. And Buffalo’s defense did not record a sack in the loss.) But it feels impossible to place the Bills’ failings squarely on McDermott’s coaching this season, or on Josh Allen, who had the lone bad playoff performance of his career to this point.
You simply could not watch the 2025 Buffalo Bills without thinking: This is the roster they’re trying to make a Super Bowl with? These receivers? That defensive back group? An aging Brandin Cooks is their best pass catching option in crunch time? Tre’Davious White is CB1? Who built this team around Allen, even after injuries decimated parts of the roster? The answer to that last question is Brandon Beane, who, rather than getting a pink slip along with McDermott on Monday, got himself a shiny new job title: president of football operations. He retains his role as GM and will now be in charge of hiring McDermott’s replacement.
In his statement announcing McDermott’s firing, Buffalo owner Terry Pegula said, “We are in need of a new structure within our leadership to give this organization the best opportunity to take our team to the next level,” and that they have “full faith in and have witnessed Brandon’s outstanding leadership style and have confidence in his abilities” to lead the organization.
These are all the things you would expect an owner to say about the GM who drafted Allen (and later signed him to a fairly team-friendly contract extension), constructed an offensive line that is consistently among the league’s best, and seems to be generally well-liked and well-respected around the league. But Beane’s team-building record in recent years has had its flaws. Specifically, he’s been unable to find a true no. 1 wide receiver to replace Stefon Diggs, whom Beane traded to Houston in 2024. Beane’s second-round pick in the 2024 draft, Keon Coleman, had just 67 catches and 960 receiving yards in his first two NFL seasons. And he was benched (or left off the game-day roster completely) at times this season for disciplinary reasons. The Bills signed Joshua Palmer to a three-year contract last offseason, but he managed only 22 catches in 12 games this season and landed on injured reserve before the playoffs. The Bills didn’t use premium draft capital on a receiver in 2025 and weren’t able to pull off a trade for one at the deadline, despite several quality pass catchers being on the market.
It was like Beane heard that part of the narrative behind Allen’s 2024 MVP award was how the quarterback thrived despite the middling pass catching talent around him and doubled down to see if his quarterback could do it again. According to ESPN’s Ben Solak, only two of the 56 players Beane has drafted since he took Allen in 2018 have made the Pro Bowl—running back James Cook and tight end Dawson Knox. The Bills simply don’t have the amount of elite impact players you would expect from a true Super Bowl contender.
Now, there’s an argument to be made that the Bills’ failures this season were no one’s fault, that injuries were too much of a factor. After all, the Bills played Saturday’s game in Denver without a starting safety and a starting corner, and the Broncos were able to take advantage of the second- and third-stringers who had been thrust into the lineup. But Beane is at least partially responsible for not restocking the defensive roster and building enough depth in the secondary to give the team a chance when injuries hit.
Beane’s rise is not an outlier. The general managers of the Browns, Raiders, Ravens, Cardinals, Giants, and Titans all kept their jobs this offseason. The only GM to be fired along with the head coach was Terry Fontenot in Atlanta. Some of these decisions make more sense than others, particularly in Baltimore: Eric DeCosta has been with the franchise forever and has a close relationship with owner Steve Bisciotti. DeCosta drafted and then re-signed two-time MVP Lamar Jackson and has a reputation for being one of the league’s most savvy personnel executives.
But New York’s Joe Schoen? His tenure is far more notable for his bungling of the Daniel Jones and Saquon Barkley contracts than it is for his role in drafting Jaxson Dart (former head coach Brian Daboll was Dart’s biggest champion in the predraft process) and other contributors in recent years. In Cleveland, Andrew Berry was the GM who ultimately signed off on executing the Deshaun Watson trade and drew up Watson’s fully guaranteed contract. No matter the role Browns ownership had in both of those moves, Berry must be considered equally responsible for that disaster of a trade. John Spytek survived the Raiders’ miserable one-and-done experience with Pete Carroll and, along with his college buddy Tom Brady, gets to hire the team’s next coach. And could NFL fans outside of Phoenix and Nashville, respectively, identify anything remarkable about Monti Ossenfort and Mike Borgonzi?
Yet those guys have at least as much power—and in Buffalo, more—than the head coaches they’ll be hiring.
So the NFL is left with only a handful of all-powerful coaches: Andy Reid in Kansas City, Kyle Shanahan in San Francisco, Payton in Denver, Mike Vrabel in New England, and Sean McVay in Los Angeles (though he is very closely aligned with longtime Rams general manager Les Snead). These are the men who have the final say on all football decisions and control over the 53-man roster. Their personalities shape the identity of not just an offensive or defensive scheme but the entire organization.
The King Coach model served the NFL and college football well for many years. Belichick created a dynasty in New England by doing things his way—which then became the Patriot Way. Nick Saban might have been the most powerful person in the state of Alabama during his tenure coaching the Crimson Tide. Has there been a more ubiquitous figure in Pittsburgh over the past two decades than Mike Tomlin? Carroll’s “always compete” mentality defined a generation of Seahawks teams. When this style of coach is successful, their teams benefit from having one consistent voice, message, and culture across the franchise. But when their message fades, their coaching acumen slips, or the roster they’ve built just isn’t very good anymore, there is no one else to blame.
A franchise structure where the coach and general manager are in total alignment seems like it would make much more sense. If the two are hired at the same time, or at the very least have similar expiration dates on their contracts, they’ll win or lose together. They’ll be fired or extended together. Such alignment would create clear job responsibilities, a clear reporting structure, and a clear message no matter who is delivering it. That’s an ideal that many teams have strived for over the years—including the Bills, who hired Beane and McDermott together out of Carolina in 2017.
But Buffalo is abandoning that model. Pegula clearly believed something had to change, and that something was the coach who couldn’t get to the next level. And no other teams participating in this current NFL hiring cycle seem even remotely interested in achieving that sort of symbiotic structure. (The Packers, notably, have reportedly agreed to a contract extension with head coach Matt LaFleur and are close to finalizing a new deal with GM Brian Gutekunst that would keep the two in alignment.)
The power shift away from the head coach and to the general manager isn’t all that different from what we’ve seen elsewhere in professional sports. Quick—can you name the person in charge of the defending NBA champions, the Oklahoma City Thunder? I wouldn’t blame you if you immediately thought of Sam Presti and not Mark Daigneault. Presti is the architect, just as Danny Ainge and Pat Riley cast imposing shadows over their respective teams in Boston and Miami. With Gregg Popovich’s retirement, Steve Kerr might be the only true star NBA coach left. And we can trace baseball’s penchant for front office stars back to the Billy Beane days in Oakland and Theo Epstein’s curse-breaking tenure in Boston. Even in MLB’s biggest media markets, managers like Aaron Boone and Dave Roberts feel like extensions of the front office, tasked with simply keeping the highly paid rosters on track.
Yet even as the nerds came for football, and analytics found its place in game strategy—often for the better—football coaches carried a different aura than their peers in other sports. Sure, you want a coach who can develop a quarterback and design a killer opening offensive script or call a perfectly timed blitz, but more than anything, football coaches represent culture. Their personalities tend to be reflected in their teams’ identities more than in any other sport. How do you square years and years of owners wanting to find the coach who is the best leader of men with the recent trend of coaches taking a back seat to GMs?
Maybe we can blame this all on a coaching cycle that is full of retread candidates and young, unproven coordinators. Until John Harbaugh joined the mix when he was fired by the Ravens, there wasn’t a single candidate who could go into interviews and demand total control of a team’s football operations. Tomlin has that gravitas, but he seems unlikely to take a new job this offseason. And so far, no coaching candidates have pulled a Liam Coen and gotten a sitting GM fired as a condition of accepting the position.
Perhaps the reason behind all of this is that NFL owners want more power for themselves, and it’s easier for them to put their thumbs on front office executives who are more behind the scenes than it is to control coaches. Or perhaps today’s general managers are more savvy and realize that job security comes from having the owner’s ear and not the coach’s.
Either way, there are a few recent success stories these franchises are chasing. The first is the Seahawks, the no. 1 seed in the NFC, who are one game away from the Super Bowl. Seattle is two seasons removed from firing Carroll and essentially promoting GM John Schneider, who then hired now-coach Mike Macdonald. Then there’s Chicago, where general manager Ryan Poles survived the disastrous Matt Eberflus era and hit a home run with the Ben Johnson hire last offseason. In Philadelphia, GM Howie Roseman has far more job security and receives far more credit for the Eagles’ recent Super Bowl runs than head coach Nick Sirianni. In a copycat league, those are pretty good examples. But so are Payton and Vrabel, two powerful CEO-style head coaches who vastly overshadow their teams’ general managers. Both coaches were hired within the last three years. One of them will be in this year’s Super Bowl.
In so many ways, this offseason feels like a sea change for the NFL. It’s not just that the league has 10 head coach openings in one offseason—it’s how many longstanding and immensely powerful coaches have left their jobs in the past few years. Only Reid, who was hired by the Chiefs in 2013, has been in his role for more than a decade. McVay, who turns 40 years old later this month, and Shanahan—both hired in 2017—are tied for the second-longest tenures. Vrabel, who was hired by New England only 53 weeks ago, is suddenly the longest-tenured coach in the AFC East. It’s fair to wonder whether any coach truly has job security anymore. But this offseason has taught us that even on the bad teams, general managers do.
